What if the entities we ascribe legal personhood to would appear in the world as autonomous beings?

are you being detained?

National anthropomorphic personifications exist as a concept, so corporate ones could be cool I guess

>appearance decided by branding
>behaviour decided by board of director behaviour
vs
>the CEO of each company is a colourful fantasy being
>they and their organizations spring up out of nowhere

Then they could bleed, and that means we could kill them.

It's one thing for a faceless non-entity to ruin your life, it's another when there's a literal embodiment of all the shitty things it has done walking around.

Companies do plenty of good things for you.

yes, but if they do enough bad to an individual that individual will try to fuck up their personification

You're saying they would make enemies and plenty of assasins would go after them.
Plenty of current powerful figures need a lot of protection too. The famous pope-mobile springs to mind.
Though I guess you could wonder about the scaling, would middling companies need to take a relatively bigger cut out of their margins for security than big companies? That would entrench big players more and intensify monopolies.

Is OP asking for "Re:Creators Smug Wendy edition"?

Then could we legally sue "Wendy's" the person, who is in legal terms a person, for any damages accrued by "Wendy's" the company?

Yes, the redhead in the blue and white dress is just the avatar of the company, there's no distinction between the company and the person

Go watch the movie "Food Fight" It's fucking awful, and also has this as a plot

Those are icons in a supermarket. They don't partake in the modern political landscape and interact with human beings.

That may be a consequence of their beliefs you can bring up to them. But that's not an expressly held set of standards as borders are necessary for a rather long list of reasons.

absolutely terrible business cards

>people that don't understand corporate personhood is to protect the general public and hold the corporation responsible for its actions
>people that think anything they don't like about capitalism is ancap

All the more justification for the setting being filled with megacorps and great income inequality.

>corporate personhood is to protect the general public and hold the corporation responsible for its actions

Hahahaha

Ahahahahahahaha

Hate to break it to you, but is fully right.

Corporate personhood is there so the people putting money into the company ARE NOT responsible for their actions. It's not about protecting the public, it's about protecting shareholders and directors of the company from what they do.

There's actually a very good reason for that - very few people will throw all their money into a business and be personally responsible if a business goes under, because then they'll be liable for all that business' debts and everything, so they'd be obliged by law to sell their house and die on the street.

Limited companies shielded people from this consequence - the shareholders could only lose the amount of money they put into the corporation, but in return, the corporation itself theoretically owned all the profits rather than the shareholders, and the government can tax it twice, effectively.

What that means is, a lot more people are making a lot more money and willing to put money on the line to do business, and the economy fucking booms, which means cheap goods and better quality of living for many people.

But it also means a lot of corporations don't have any accountability. Corporate personhood was never there to protect the public.

Same

They would be imprisioned for illegal and shaddy practises.

Would you still be able to buy Wendy's products if she was in prison? You can't hire someone that was in jail.

It's also about who you sue.
You don't want elaborate labyrinths of decision making and puppet leaders that end up being held responsible. You want to be able to sue the company as a whole, so anyone that has a stake in making it transgress ethics for profits will be proportionally hurt by the fine.

What an argument!

>corporate personhood is to protect the general public and hold the corporation responsible for its actions

Top tier delusion. The main point is that corporations get to enjoy the benefits of personhood without any of the downsides or responsibilities.

>unlimited bribery is for the public good
>honest guys
>and it you don't drink the kool aid you're from reddit!

you're the one that has to go back user, shills aren't welcome here

Most of corporate personhood is done in order to redirect blame and responsibility from the person(s) who made a decision to the corporation themselves. It is what allows members of major corporation's C-suites to do a lot of the shit they do.

>What that means is, a lot more people are making a lot more money and willing to put money on the line to do business, and the economy fucking booms, which means cheap goods and better quality of living for many people.

It's less more people making money and willing to put money on the line than corporate personhood made a lot of formerly high risk/high reward investments low risk/high reward. Many of the consequences have been shifted from a real person who would face those consequence (such as prison terms) to a non-person who can not be effected by those consequences.

True. A real person can get jailed for tax evasion, a corporate personhood can only be fined.

In theory yes, but most of the time those fines are absorbed in ways that do not actually harm the transgressors and only end up harming the mostly innocent.

That can be said about any lost profit. The point of fines is to negate any profit that can be made from breaking the law, making it pointless. You can complain about enforcement and stuff but not really about the concept of corporate personhood itself.

post more wendy and less arguing about politics please

They're called Hyperobjects, its an idea that's been kicking around in a variety of forms for a bit. If you like reading continental theory check out Timothy Morton (Ecology Without Nature), Reza Negarestani (Cyclonopedia), Nick Land if you have to but meh. They're expanding on Deleuze/Guttari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia arc to things that aren't just technical assemblages. Basically it can be read all the way back to Hegel if you're in the mood.

That sounds pretty cool actually.
Is it philosophy or Veeky Forums-esque worldbuilding?

They would regularly get murdered or kidnapped by their own workers.

I looked it up some more. It's philosophy. And the vague poetic European kind too.
I am european and I have much greater respect for American philosophers.
ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.nl/2012/12/what-does-hyperobjects-say.html

Murder an cannibalise other personhoods. Sometimes they allow others to eat them.

Its continental phil, but Negarestani gets medium insane with oil as a sentientish antilife mythos sort of thing that's trying to destroy the world by spreading through globalized petroleum distribution. As psudofictional archaeology?

Morton does things through a literature studies sort of lense, Land just did a bunch of speed and thought jungle music was going to lead to fully automated singularity communism. D&G are straight up phil, but it ends up having scifi world building because they were writing about globalization and interconnected massive scale processes.

I like it. Takes a while to read though.

>No Weyland-Yutani card

The C-suite and stockholders tend to still end up profiting the same amount which just ends up making the law break a risk that didn't pay off. The corporation gets hurt, but the ones who actually broke the law are unharmed.

Its kinda sad that science fiction has lost so much of its philosophical aspects. I wonder, if in the far future, Asimov will be remembered as a great philosopher.

I just picked up Jo Walton's Just City series (god machines take a bunch of humans and try to get them to make The Republic). Its not bad, and given its ambitions didn't totally fuck it up.

Peter Watts does sort of phil based scifi. He's going hard Dawkins lately which is less interesting to me. Starfish is still the best of the lot imo, but people seemed to enjoy Blindsight a lot.

Yeah, that's kind of fuck up. The majority of acquisitions are actually amicable and consensual. But as hyperobjects it'd be like vore. You can't have companies-turned-departments still be sentient, little heads, that'd be horrifying.
I guess sometimes a bitch just craves to be part of a bigger whole.

>The C-suite and stockholders tend to still end up profiting the same amount
You can't divert the entire cost. Make your products more expensive and people will stop buying them, decrease your employees pay and people will look for other business opportunities.
Bringing up that side of the punishment goes all the way back to having the law in the first place. The opportunity cost will get diverted not just to stockholders, but to employees and customers too. Yeah, we get that. We don't have a problem with it actually, those are acceptable costs for stopping the harm the company could do.

>no Toha Heavy Industries

Bullshit. Most of the time all the fine does is return the profit margin to closer to where it should be if the corporation had not been playing loose with the law. Its less often breaking/twisting the law to turn a debt into a profit than turning a profit into a larger one.

Corporations have developed a lot of ways to use corporate personhood in order to avoid various costs therefore increasing their profits.

Then you're just arguing about the size of the fines. Stating that corporations get away with crimes too often, making them into calculated risks. It's the sentencing you have a problem with, not the legal structure that makes it possible.

The second option is a bit dr. mcNinja.

Its not the size of the fines. Its the fact that because of corporate personhood, the CFO/C-suite that initiated the corporate tax evasion/law break can't be held responsible when the evasion is discovered, left with a sizable golden parachute and is now working somewhere else doing the same shit.

That's the preferable alternative to insane structures of hierarchy where the person that's legally accountable is making none of the decisions. You've got to think in alternatives man.
Besides, if you bring a company to ruin because of legal entaglements due to your leadership, you bet you're going to feel the consequence of that.

i want to hu g the smug out of wendy

> literally what did he mean by this?
"What if things we define as real would actually be real?"

I want to get back to the thread topic.
Specifically stuff like this what are the mechanics of these corporate avatars?

>I am european and I have much greater respect for American philosophers.

I bet you love ancient Roman sciences as well.

>what are the mechanics of these corporate avatars?

They're high-tier dindus.

Are you saying American philosophy is not real philosophy?

It is, in the same way Atheism is a religion.

I bet you're an idiot.

You're really focusing on the "gets away with everything" aspect, huh?
What about the smaller ones, the liquor store on the corner? The elementary school?

It's true and practical philosophy, not a literature endeavor of abstraction and impenetrability one-up-manship.
There's ideas being discussed and argued, not language being twisted and deformed, like with the continental degenerates carving coherent thought into an unrecognizable mess like a sadistic kid playing doctor

>Wendy roasts people left and right
>gets mad cred

>Burger King opens in Belgium with "Who's Your King?" campaign
>pits their mascot vs head of Belgian royal family
>Belgian royal family is much like British royal family, no real power, but high representative reputation
>Belgian citizens actually like their royalty
>royal family is not amused, officially declares distaste for such advertising practices
>Burger King might get boycotted before they even started

Smugness is an art. Any bloke can dish the burn, but only the master will keep getting away with it.

Briefly sum up American philosophy then.

You can steal from Japanese folklore and Shintoism - make them Kami Spirits. Spirit can dwell in pretty much anything, but only with age and importance of sacred object / region it truly grows in power.

Practical and coherent thought. Analytic. A lot of logical positivism and where it isn't it's supported with arguments and reasoning.

>people who have never read Hoppe strawmanning ancapism
I'm not even an ancap and I've at least read Democracy: The God That Failed to understand the model of an ancap state with strong external borders.

What does a shinto kami actually do?
As far as I udnerstand, you just have a little shrine to pay it respect and if you don't it might curse you.
I think corporations have a banality to them that's distinctly un-spiritual. Like, you can get in a twitter spat with one. And it won't be a huge transgression that ends with you being cursed. They're powerful, but not prideful or exalted.

Who is baby face supposed to be?

Bob of Bob's Big Boy

Can you imagine not being able to go to your coffee parlor, or do your day job for a whole month just because one middle-aged white woman got served a cup that was too hot?
People would riot.
Quickly it is established that corps can only be punished with fines, perhaps prosecution of some key staff members if the crime is really severe. The avatar itself doesn't experience a thing.

>Its kinda sad that science fiction has lost so much of its philosophical aspects.
Like regular philosophy, science keeps eating into its turf.

>As far as I udnerstand, you just have a little shrine to pay it respect and if you don't it might curse you.
If you revere them then they help you out with nice stuff, like discounts and loyalty cards.

Some guy once said, good sciencefiction can predict the car, great science fiction can predict the traffic jam.
You can go into great detail creating a spacefaring ship, conforming to all laws of nature as we currently understand them. That'll earn you brownie points with any NASA employees reading your stuff. But you could also deal with the nature of politics and frontiers in a society where explorative space travel has just been made feasable. That could give your work value lasting for generations to come.
I guess you could say that's political science and economy, social sciences.

Oh, the political side? That's easy enough - politics is already chaotic and nonsensical IRL right now so nobody wants to write stories that make it even weirder. Plus the divisiveness means any audience gets cut in half.
>USA survives into the future and colonizes other worlds
>FUCKING KKK NAZI RACIST REEEEE
>UN or other world government colonizes other worlds
>FUCKING KIKES 1488 BLAZE IT FGT GLOBALISTS GET OUT REEEEE

yeah, that's pretty accurate, and there's still plenty of good high-concept sci fi, and lots of encyclopedic fiction, so academic study really hasn't pushed it out any.

I find Veeky Forums gets lots of logical positivist STEMfags arguing that science has made philosophy or humanities obsolete, often explicitly because they feel they get by fine without it.

I'm a pretty strong STEMfag and at least personally I think that obselete is a pretty strong word. Science is causing change in the world faster than has occurred in any other time, and surely the arts and humanities will be changed with it. But developing new technologies won't make the old works disappear, nor the old artists. Take molecular gastronomy as an example, it added new possibilities to the kitchen, but most people still cook as they always have with little regard for the underlying chemistry.

The usual argument is that a lot of things that used to be the realm of religion or philosophy now have a solid scientific explanation, and it's inevitable that the rest will follow. This of course ignores the external factors shaping science, like how climate policy only makes sense in the context of backdoor socialism.

G U L A G S
F O R
E V E R Y O N E

I've heard the comment "I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one" bandied about in response to the Citizens United decision. What would this look like in OP's premise?

The 60 foot tall popular fast food franchise avatar is devastating downtown! Are you man enough to stop it?

>Just don't look
>Just don't look

>no Union Aerospace Corporation
wiw lad

...

Oh hell now you reminded me of all the size fetish porn of Wendy. Fucking vorefags everywhere.

Someone slipped you a Special Order sir, just sit down in the designated booth in the back and embrace your destiny.

Would you like fries with that?

The metatropolis series is really good, but only briefly touches on it in most books. The ai/hyperobject are impossible to write for well though, they are best when they are mysterious, super powerful and offscreen... Like primarchs.

In India gods are given the status of persons, so that they can own property like temples. But, since they are legally minors, their priests have to represent them.

The collections of shorts by different authors? They look neat. I'll check them out.

If a company goes bankrupt, they have to execute the avatar in order to liquidate the assets.
It'd be a lot like the dip in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Collect video evidence and testinomies.
Once the board of directors is presented with it they'll have no choice but to split up the company into smaller subdivisions in order to avoid the embarresment and legal consequences of their company avatar going kaiju.

Honestly it would make an interesting setting. Sorta of a reverse djinn. I might write fag something on the morrow.

>unlimited bribery

Oh god, that's a terrible idea. Did they seriously do that?

Petition websites would become even more of a useless clusterfuck than they are today.

Right up there with McDonald's trying to force Clan Macdonald to change the name of their resturant in their castle to something other than MacDonald's.

Yeah, they lost that case and every franchise in the UK and Scotland.

>Clan Macdonald
>UK and Scotland
Uh, what?

If you mean some family restaurant named MacDonald on Cayman Islands, then yes, that family restaurant won, and McDonald's is banned from the island. Not really the same thing though.